Re: Hal Crowther and the Tea Party

"Whose side are you on, Brother?"

In response to Hal Crowther's quote of "who could possibly wish to be on the other side?" ("The Tea Party," May 5):

I am a North Carolinian. I was born and raised a Democrat. My father was the Democratic chairman of our precinct for many years. He was a close friend of Congressman Basil L. Whitener and tirelessly campaigned for Dan K. Moore when he ran for governor. He was also a textile worker who unsuccessfully led three efforts to unionize the mill where he worked. My 84-year-old mother was recently honored for her many years as secretary/ treasurer of the Democratic Women in my home county.

While in college in the 1970s, I was an alternate delegate to the 1976 National Democratic Convention and while still in my 20s was chairman of my county's Democratic Party. While a College Democrat I attended a state Young Democrats convention in Chapel Hill. Most of the delegates were also college students. On one social issue after another I was on the losing side as the students supported the most liberal positions imaginable. A young man, who was not a college student but a mill worker, asked the group to endorse the efforts to unionize N.C.'s workers. He was not only voted down, he was shouted down. These same "Democrats" who supported abortion, gay rights, etc., were totally against the working man. It was my first hint that there was no longer a place for me in the Democratic Party and that the party was no longer the party of Jeffersonfor small government and the "little man" (the small farmer, the small businessman and the worker).

I tried being a Republican but Bush & Company proved to me that they are still the party of the rich and "big business," bought and paid for by the multinational corporations (as are the Democrats). Now I'm a registered Libertarian, though at heart I'm still the Democrat I was raised as, but now I'm a proud "tea partier" who believes "the government that governs least governs best."

"Whose side are you on, Brother?"

Kent W. McCouryApex

Long live Crowther!

In a world in which sanity is in short supply, it is good to have Hal Crowther ("The Tea Party," May 5). The Democrats are so afraid of being called Marxists that they are dragging their feet on most needed legislation, and the other party seems afraid to say yes to anything. Can you imagine what the Tea Partiers would have said about Nelson Rockefeller? Or Dwight Eisenhower, let alone Abraham Lincoln? And imagine how they would react to the rhetoric of Tom Paine!

Hostility toward government is so great that even "moderate" Republicans are defending a terrorist's right to buy a gun, for fear that regulation of firearms might threaten their own store of weapons. When Sarah Palin says "Don't retreatReload," and some on the right advocate taking to the streets with guns if conservatives don't prevail in the next election, we seem on the verge of turning the asylum over to the inmates. Long live Crowther!